Asylum Seeker Resource Centre - 2026 Tidy Towns and Cities - Heritage and Culture Finalist
At the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre's Community Kitchen in Footscray, the person teaching the cooking class is often the person who, a week earlier, was just receiving a meal.
The Member Recipes Project flips that dynamic deliberately. Each quarter, three or four ASRC members are invited to share two or three recipes from their home countries, most recently Egyptian and Pakistani dishes, demonstrate how to cook them, and run a hands-on workshop for Community Kitchen volunteers. The recipes are documented and shared in print and digital formats so the wider community can cook them too, built wherever possible around ingredients already available through the ASRC Foodbank, so members can recreate the dishes at home.
Participants receive gift vouchers for their time, recognition for what the ASRC is explicit about wanting the project to represent: members as experts with valuable knowledge, not simply people receiving a service.
What staff and volunteers have learned along the way is that cooking together does something a formal briefing can't. A shared recipe carries family history and cultural context that deepens understanding faster than any training session.
The X-factor is the ripple effect: one member's recipe becomes a volunteer's new skill, a shared meal, and eventually a resource the whole community can use.
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